How to report a problem short-term rental in Kansas City

The house two doors down changed hands, and now it changes occupants every weekend. Different cars, a lockbox on the railing, and at one in the morning on a Saturday, a party that is not anybody’s neighbors.

Kansas City has a route for this, and unusually for a city records story, the route works and the paperwork behind it is up to date. The complaint goes through 311. Every complaint is then published, and when The Kansas City Stare pulled the file on September 15, 2026, the city had refreshed it the day before.

That is worth saying plainly, because this newspaper has spent the last two weeks reporting city files frozen in April, January, and 2024. This one is current. What it needs is a reader who knows what its columns mean.

The thirty-second version

To report one: call 311, use the myKCMO app, or file on the city’s web form. The complaint routes to the Neighborhood Services short-term rental group.

To follow it, or your block’s: go to data.kcmo.org, open dataset 6cgx-tx5z, “Short-Term Rental 311 Complaints”, and search the address in the search box on the dataset page. Free, no account, 1,581 complaints on file.

Before you expect a fast answer: among complaints that closed, the median took 40 days.

What the file holds

Every short-term rental complaint the city has taken since April 23, 2022, through September 11, 2026. Each row carries a work order number, the date and time it was opened, the current status, the resolved date where there is one, the reporting channel, the council district, the incident address, and a map point.

Where the complaints stand, as of the September 15, 2026 pull:

Canceled is the one to read carefully. It is not a finding about the property and not a resolution; it means the request was closed out without being carried through. It is one complaint in eight.

How long it takes

Among the 1,259 resolved complaints: median 40 days, average 88.5, longest 992. Sixty-one took more than a year.

The 112 still open are the more useful number if you are about to file. The oldest was opened on August 25, 2023 and had been open 1,117 days when The Stare pulled the file.

The catch: the days-to-close column is filled in on cases that never closed

Every row in this file carries a days-to-close figure, including the 112 that are still open, and on those rows it is not measuring anything a reader would expect.

The Stare checked all 1,581 rows on September 15, 2026. On the 1,469 closed complaints it matches the resolved date minus the open date on all but one of them, which is what it should be. On the still-open ones it matches neither the elapsed time nor the last update. The oldest open complaint carries 928 in that column while 1,117 days had actually passed.

Use that column for closed cases only. On an open case, subtract the open date from today yourself, and the answer will be bigger than the file suggests.

The second catch: the registration answer is stored as broken text

Each complaint carries a field recording whether the property had a current short-term rental registration. That is the single most useful fact in the file, because it separates a complaint about a licensed business from a complaint about one operating without a registration.

It is stored as text that looks like structured data and is not. Here is an actual value, exactly as the city publishes it:

{Does the property have a current Short Term Rental registration?":"NO"}"

The opening key has no quotation mark, and there is one too many at the end. 1,263 of the 1,578 rows that carry this field are stored that way, and a standard reader hands back an error rather than an answer. Anyone building a dashboard, a neighborhood tracker, or a story on this file has to write code to pick the answer out of a damaged string, and anyone who assumes it will parse gets nothing.

Read past the formatting and the answer is stark: no on 1,194 rows, yes on 69. The overwhelming majority of short-term rental complaints in Kansas City concern properties the record says had no current registration.

Two of the file’s own classifications point the same way: 183 complaints are labeled Unregistered STR Property and 133 a concern with a registered one. The remaining 1,262 carry an internal investigation label that says nothing either way.

Where the complaints come from

Nearly half of every short-term rental complaint in Kansas City comes from the 4th District, which takes in downtown, the Crossroads, and the Plaza area. The plain reading comes first: that is where the short-term rental stock is concentrated, so the count is tracking the rentals rather than the neighbors. The file carries nothing that would let anyone separate those two explanations, and this piece does not try.

A note on the second copy

The city publishes this same file twice. Dataset 88d2-t75a, “STR Reported Issues”, holds the same 1,581 records, the same first row, the same status counts, and the same September 14, 2026 refresh, with one extra column naming the source category. Either answers the question. Say which one you used, because the names differ and the numbers will not.

What the file will not tell you

• Whether a rental is registered, unless somebody has complained about it. This is a complaint file, not a registry.
• What the inspector found. There is no narrative, no code section, and no outcome beyond the status.
• Whether anything changed at the property. Resolved describes the 311 case.
• Who owns it. No owner, no operator, no permit number.

How to check us

Every number above came from unauthenticated requests against the city’s own data service on September 15, 2026. No key, no account. The whole file is one request:

# Download every short-term-rental complaint
curl "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/6cgx-tx5z.json?\$limit=5000"

It returned 1,581 records. The status split is this:

# Count the complaints by status
curl "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/6cgx-tx5z.json?\$select=current_status,count(1)&\$group=current_status"

It returned 1,259 resolved, 210 canceled, and 112 received. The full file is archived with this story.

What we are asking the city: whether the registration field will be repaired so it can be read, and what a resident should expect after filing, given that the median closed complaint took 40 days and 112 are still open. When Neighborhood Services answers, this page gets the answer and a dateline. If you filed one of these and watched what happened next, tell us: tips@kcstare.com.